Nine Chronicles Raises $2.6M Growth Round Led By Animoca Brands 🎉
- We raised $2.6M USD to scale the Nine Chronicles network to millions of users, build exciting content with novel token economics, support our ecosystem with developer fund and new governance programs.
- Growth partners joining this round include Animoca Brands, Divergence Ventures, IDEO CoLab, Sfermion, Hypersphere Ventures, SkyVision Capital and notable angels such as Axie Infinity Co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin, Aave CEO Stani Kulechov, and The Sandbox COO Sebastien Borget.
- Massive Growth: 850% DAU growth in Q2 with half a million NFTs crafted by the players. 2000+ nodes powering the network daily.
- Wrapped NCG coming to Ethereum: MISO IDO on Aug 10th, trading starts on SushiSwap on Aug 17th.
🧙🏼The humble beginning
We still remember when we started building games on blockchain without an office 3 years ago. We were a humble side-project team, collaborating remotely after our 9-to-6 “day” job because decentralized gaming seemed like an intriguing idea. When we began, we certainly did not expect to see twenty thousand people from 130 countries playing an open-source RPG that runs on a decentralized network across the globe.
In our early days (even though we still are in early days), friends would always ask us — why would you need to build a game on blockchain?
Well, we need blockchain in gaming world for the following reason: because we want games to really belong to our users. A single company should not be able to shut down our beloved memories and histories of a virtual world just because it is not profitable. We believe users should be able to play the game and define how it should be played — as players are the real owners who create stories and, therefore, value of a game.
One of the biggest challenges of this project was: “can multi-user online games really run on a blockchain?” Theoretically, it seemed doable. Still, no single project went down the whole way up until Nine Chronicles did. We felt obliged to show to the world that it was, in fact, possible.
⤴️ The massive growth
Nine Chronicles became the world’s first fully decentralized online RPG when we launched the mainnet in October 2020. This year we’ve witnessed dramatic user growth, growing 20% per week (850% growth in Q2) past few months after our play-to-earn portal launch.
Key Metrics:
- 10000+ NCG holders
- 2000+ Full nodes powering the network daily
- 2,500,000+ Battles processed on-chain
- 500,000+ NFTs crafted by players
- 80,000+ NFTs traded on in-house decentralized marketplace
Not only many players found us, but during this time we fully open sourced our codebases with a software grant program, released Nine Chronicles Improvement Proposals (NCIP) for players to contribute ideas, and built a Discord community of 20,000 people who are so passionate about evolving our network together that it continues to humble us.
Now many of the best ideas for Nine Chronicles are coming directly from the community. This fundraise is all about enabling them.
🏋🏼‍♀️ The Raise
We are proud to announce that Nine Chronicles has raised a total of $2.6M USD from world-class partners who will help to accelerate our network’s growth.
We began this process wanting to build relationships with key partners who deeply understood our commitment to open-source, community powered gaming. Animoca Brands, leading this round, is a pioneer and veteran in blockchain gaming since its inception. We are thrilled to learn from them and their leading portfolio of games which includes Axie Infinity and The Sandbox.
For some, this is their first investment on a gaming network that primarily serves gaming assets and content. It’s amazing to see how far blockchain gaming has come as a category and to witness our partners’ support.
Institution Partners
- (Lead) Animoca Brands
- (Co-Lead) Divergence Ventures
- IDEO CoLab Ventures
- Sfermion
- Hypersphere Ventures
- SkyVision Capital
- Sneaky VC
- Zilliqa Capital
- Taureon
- DSRV
- ROK Capital
- Cultur3
- BlockCrafters
Angels and Advisors
- Jeffrey Zirlin (Jiho) (Co-founder and Head of Growth, Axie Infinity)
- Sebastien Borget (Co-founder and COO, Sandbox)
- Stani Kulechov (Founder and CEO, Aave)
- See Eun Ha (CEO, Nonce)
Here are some quotes from our investors followed by a statement from our founders:
“Animoca Brands is incredibly happy to support Nine Chronicles on its journey to build the largest decentralized RPG network powered by players. Planetarium’s dedication to open source is truly inspiring, and will pave unique growth opportunities through player-created content and assets. We look forward to future collaborations with our leading portfolio of decentralized games.”
Yat Siu, Co-founder and Chairman of Animoca Brands
“When we met Kijun and JC one word came to mind: grit. Nine Chronicles is one of the most decentralized networks, with fully open sourced foundation for modders and developers to build on. With over half a million NFTs crafted by the users, they’re only getting started.”
Paris Rouzati, General Partner, IDEO CoLab Ventures
“Nine Chronicles is not sampling the possibilities of NFT-enabled gaming platforms. They are flipping the script and spearheading the shift towards open-source, decentralized, user-owned gaming networks. We don’t know exactly what the future of Metaverse gaming will look like, but Nine Chronicles may just show us.”
Andrew Steinwold and Dan Patterson, Partners, Sfermion
“Hypersphere is excited to support Planetarium’s first major open-source, serverless role-playing game Nine Chronicles. Unlike other crypto-based games in which only a portion of game state touches the blockchain, Nine Chronicles is completely on-chain and also allows users infinite ability to modify the game universe. We strongly believe in Planetarium’s vision to decentralize and flip the traditional power hierarchies between large game developers and their users.”
Amelia Cai, Investment Partner, Hypersphere
“Nine Chronicles is a standout example of decentralised, on-chain gaming that will set the standard for the future of the industry. With its serverless and open source architecture, the players control the narrative, shaping the game they love and play while generating an entirely new level of community involvement. Building and maintaining such a unique community requires a creative vision and dedicated team, and we firmly believe Planetarium is in the best position to usher in this new era of blockchain gaming.”
Sneaky Ventures
“Kijun and the Nine Chronicles team have been building relentlessly for the past years way before NFT gaming became a trend. I’m ecstatic to join their adventure and will be following their progress closely.”
Jeffrey Zirlin (Jiho), Co-founder and Head of Growth at Axie Infinity
“Nine Chronicles brings gaming experience on-chain with the ability to own your asset and govern the game experience together with your community. Nine Chronicles is open source meaning that anyone can participate in building the future of gaming.”
Stani Kulechov, Founder and CEO of Aave
“We are thrilled to invite amazing partners and advisors to expand the Nine Chronicles ecosystem. The new round of funding allows us to offer Nine Chronicles on multiple platforms and gear up for our next phase of growth. The future of RPGs is moving in a direction where the players and the community collaborate on a shared vision, and we look forward to building a such foundation for Nine Chronicles with new governance programs. As one of the very few teams taking this commitment head-on we are uniquely positioned to lead a revolution in disruptive gaming experiences powered by the community.”
JC Kim and Kijun Seo, Co-founders and CEOs of Planetarium
🚀 What’s next?
Nine Chronicles is rapidly gaining attention from gamers worldwide! With an outstanding growth comes great responsibility — as a free-to-play blockchain network, we had to limit our daily invitation to ensure an optimal onboarding experience as invitation requests started to overflow. There are several plans on our roadmap to stabilize growth and get you on the network soon.
Our next goal is to scale fast, build exception content, introduce stronger token economics, and support community contribution.
Content
- PvP arena reboot (discuss on Discord)
- Collaborative missions and events
- Crafting rework to increase variance and rarity
- Cross-chain NFTs on Ethereum
- More stages and recipes 🍕
Economics
- Crystals: new inflationary currency from dismantling items
- Long term incentives for high tier players
- Market/blacksmith fee recycling
- Increase energy usage and introduce ways for miners/validators to earn them by processing transactions
Platforms and Network
- Nine Chronicles Mobile
- RPC game client: currently everyone playing Nine Chronicles is running a full-node of the chain. RPC clients will connect to other full nodes — will make the initial loading instantaneous, and reduce delay across the network
- Proof of Stake network migration
Team and Community
- Hire exceptional talent: already on our way, can’t wait to share more news soon!
- More grants for open source developers working on NCIPs
- Governance features
Our roadmap lists a few more.
And remember, Nine Chronicles is a 100% open-source project. If you have ideas, come find us on Discord and you can start contributing! We’re always looking for more contributors to support with our grant program.
🍣 Join Our MISO IDO on Aug 10th!
Last but not least, our base token Nine Chronicles Gold (NCG) is making its debut on the main Ethereum network.
We are proudly announcing Wrapped NCG (WNCG), an ERC-20 token that delivers the power of NCG with the flexibility of an ERC-20 token.
This initiative will expand the NCG landscape beyond just our 20,000 players — but to the entire ETH ecosystem. 164,942,136 ETH users* can now hold, trade NCG and participate in NCG governance — making it truly decentralized.
*Ethereum Unique Addresses on 1st Aug on Etherscan
We are collaborating with the leading de-fi protocol SushiSwap to present our token to the world for the first time. WNCG token will be offered in a public sale via SushiSwap’s MISO Launchpad on Aug 10th in a batch auction.
To learn more, please refer to our post on WNCG and Ethereum Bridge release.
We really appreciate the love and support from our community ❤️
If you’re discovering us for the first time, follow us on Twitter, and you can also join our Discord to learn more about the open source RPG network powered by the community.
Want to write about us? Here’s our media kit.
